BART’s new railcars will be assembled in Bay Area,...

1of5A passenger uses a Clipper card to exit the fare gates at the 19th Street BART station in Oakland, Calif. on Thursday, Aug. 2, 2018. BART is setting up a bus bridge between the West Oakland station and the 19th Street and Lake Merritt stations during selected weekends in August and September to perform critical track work.Photo: Paul Chinn / The Chronicle

2of5An apartment building is reflected in a BART train window at the MacArthur BART station in Oakland, California, on Tuesday, April 23, 2019.Photo: Gabrielle Lurie / The Chronicle

3of5Lee Sanders, Bombardier Americas Division president, announces new plant in Pittsburg will assemble most of the rest of BARTÕs new rail cars.Photo: Michael Cabanatuan / SFC

4of5People get off the new BART train at the Powell Street Station that's heading toward Daly City on Wednesday, Oct. 24, 2018, in San Francisco, Calif. After many delays, BART has begun running its new trains on complete routes from the East Bay to stations in San Francisco and Daly City.Photo: Santiago Mejia / The Chronicle

5of5Vehicle engineer Rodney Lim rides the rails as BART shows off one of their new trains to the media at the South Hayward station, Ca., as seen on July 23, 2017. Most of BART’s new rail cars will soon be built at an assembly plant in Pittsburg, officials announced Friday.Photo: Michael Macor / The Chronicle

Most of BART’s new rail cars will soon be built in east Contra Costa County, giving a boost to the area’s struggling industrial economy and speeding delivery of the transit agency’s future fleet.

Bombardier, the Canadian company building the transit system’s Fleet of the Future, plans to open an assembly plant at a large industrial site off of Loveridge Road in Pittsburg. The company expects to hire about 50 people to help assemble the cars.

Work on assembling BART’s 775 modern rail cars, which is currently done in upstate New York, is expected to move to Pittsburg within months, Bombardier Americas President Lee Sanders announced at a news conference in the warehouse Friday.

“We will be transferring these jobs to California,” he said, standing in front of a shiny new BART car sitting on a truck trailer.

Bombardier has produced 89 of the new rail cars at its assembly plant in Plattsburgh, NY, and delivered them to BART’s Hayward yard by truck. Social media photos of BART cars rolling across the Great Plains are not uncommon on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook.

Beginning in September those rail cars — with three doors, video screens, automated announcements and brightly colored interiors — will be assembled in Pittsburg and delivered to a Bart yard.

Eighty of the new cars — enough to make up eight full-length trains — are in service, and they’ve been popular among commuters who appreciate the cleaniness, the functioning air conditioning and heating sytems and the new-car look and feel. But the cars have also been behind schedule in arriving to the Bay Area and being placed on the tracks.

BART’s initial plan was to replace and slightly expand its existing fleet of 669 rail cars, many of them more than 40 years old, by 2022 but that date has been pushed back to spring of 2023. By now, BART was supposed to have 176 cars on hand.

Sanders said Bombardier has picked up the pace on delivering new cars, and is now on schedule. But building the trains in the Bay Area “should certainly help with reducing delays,” he said. “This way we’ll make it in the Bay Area for the Bay Area.”

And with Bay Area workers. Politicians from east Contra Costa, a historically industrial area, hailed the new jobs, hoping the 50 new positions at Bombardier would grow, and also attract other manufacturers to their part of the Bay Area.

“This means local jobs and continued growth of our manufacturing base here in Pittsburg,” said Mayor Juan Banales. “Hopefully it acts as a catalyst to create more jobs locally.’

BART and Contra Costa leaders worked together to help lure Bombardier to the plant, which was also used when the transit system overhauled its original rail cars in the late 1990s. The state helped to lure the rail manufacturer with $1 million in California Competes tax credits that will be paid out over five years, said Maryanne Roberts, a Bombardier spokeswoman.

Michael Cabanatuan has covered all things transportation for the San Francisco Chronicle — from BART strikes, acrobatic bridge construction and dark dirty tunnel excavations to the surging ridership on public transportation and the increasing conflict as cars, bikes and pedestrians struggle to coexist on the streets. He’s ridden high-speed trains in Japan, walked in BART’s Transbay Tube and driven to King City at 55 mph to test fuel efficiency.

He joined The Chronicle as a suburban reporter and deputy bureau chief in Contra Costa County, and has also covered the general assignment beat. In addition to transportation, Michael covers a variety of Bay Area news, including breaking news events. He’s been tear-gassed covering demonstrations in Oakland and exposed to nude protesters in the Castro District. Michael is also a regular contributor to the City Insider column and blog.